Fall of the inner German border
[1] However, this meant that as soon as one of the other eastern bloc nations relaxed its border controls, the East Germans would be able to exit in large numbers.
Hungary was at that time a popular tourist destination for East Germans, due to the trappings of prosperity that were absent at home – good and plentiful food and wine, pleasant camping and a lively capital city.
However, the hardline East German leader, Erich Honecker – who had been responsible for the building of the Berlin Wall in 1961 – remained staunchly against any reform in his country.
"[3] Hungary was the earliest of any eastern bloc nation to institute reform under its reformist Prime Minister Miklós Németh, who took office in November 1988.
"[10] The state newspaper Neues Deutschland ran an editorial, said to have been dictated by Honecker personally, which declared that "by their behaviour they have trampled on all moral values and excluded themselves from our society."
Small pro-democracy demonstrations rapidly swelled into crowds of hundreds of thousands of people in cities across East Germany.
East Germany was, in any case, in a very different situation from China; it depended on loans from the West and the continued support of the Soviets, both of which would have been critically jeopardised by a massacre of unarmed demonstrators.
[12] After Honecker was publicly chided by Gorbachev in October 1989 for his refusal to embrace reform, reformist members of the East German Politbüro sought to rescue the situation by forcing the resignation of the veteran Party chairman.
Schools were closed because the teachers had fled; factories and offices shut down because of lack of essential staff; even milk rounds were cancelled after the milkmen departed.
The formerly subservient GDR media began publishing eye-opening reports of high-level corruption, spurring demands for fundamental reform.
It was announced on the evening of 9 November 1989 by Politburo member Günter Schabowski at a somewhat chaotic press conference in East Berlin.
The new border control regime was proclaimed as a means of liberating the people from a situation of psychological pressure by legalising and simplifying migration.
The iconic scenes that followed – people pouring into West Berlin, standing on the Wall and attacking it with pickaxes – were broadcast worldwide.
[18] At the Helmstedt crossing point on the Hanover–Berlin autobahn, cars were backed up for 65 km (40 mi); some drivers waited 11 hours to drive across to the West.
At Herrenhof on the Elbe, hundreds of East Germans pushed their way through the border fence to board the first cross-river ferry to run since April 1945.
The local people turned out in their hundreds to welcome them; stout men and women in their Sunday best, twice or three times the average age of those getting off the trains, wept as they clapped.
The power of the SED's mythology evaporated overnight and previously prized ideological attributes became liabilities, rather than stepping stones for advancement.
The state was bankrupt, the economy collapsing, the political class discredited, the governing institutions in chaos and the people demoralised by the evaporation of the collective assumptions which had underpinned their society for nearly fifty years.
[29] The removal of restrictions on travel prompted hundreds of thousands of East Germans to migrate to the West – over 116,000 of them between 9 November and 31 December 1989, compared with 40,000 for the whole of the previous year.
[30] The new East German leadership initiated "round table" talks with opposition groups, similar to the processes that had led to multi-party elections in Hungary and Poland.
[31] When the first free elections were held in March 1990, the former SED, which had renamed itself PDS, was swept out of power and replaced by a pro-reunification Alliance for Germany coalition led by the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), Chancellor Kohl's party.
Now that the CDU was in power on both sides of the border, the two countries progressed rapidly towards reunification, while international diplomacy paved the way abroad.
The biggest remaining obstacle, the question of NATO-membership of a unified Germany, was removed in a private visit of the German leaders to Gorbachev's dacha in the Caucasus mountains.
